Tethys (660 miles, 1062 kilometers across) appears as a small white dot above the rings on the far left of the image. Enceladus (313 miles, 504 kilometers across) appears as a smaller bright speck beside the planet as seen from this vantage point. The rings cast wide shadows on the planet's southern latitudes.

This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 1 degree below the ringplane.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2012. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 63 degrees. Image scale is 104 miles (167 kilometers) per pixel on Saturn.

The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.